SACRED COWBOYS
Cold Harvest (LP) | Order it!!
Cold Harvest: 2007
Garry Gray (vocals, backing vocals, lyrics), Spencer P Jones (guitar, backing vocals), Penny Ikinger (guitars, backing vocals), Terry Doolan (guitars, organ, backing vocals), Mark Ferrie (bass), Nick Rischbieth (bass), Stephan Fidock (drums).
“‘Cold Harvest’ with all guitars blasting out of a crumbling sun I got this narrative urban uprising driven by dysfunctional dreamers powerless onlookers. I always wanted us to do this as a guitar album . The ‘Sacred Cowboys’ are back shooting horses”, says Gray and adds, “It’s about time. The world is at high noon and there aint nothin’ better to do.” (Jan, 2007)
Through the wilderness .
After the ‘Trouble From Providence’ album, around 1992, came the computerised experimental phase. Gray felt this wasn’t really producing vintage Cowboys material in the form scorched earth guitar attack.
He went psycadelic with ‘The Merry Pranksters’ and Nick Rischbieth and Mick Holmes. One fine trip, Gray ran into brother Spencer P Jones at a ‘Pranksters’ gig. Tony Cohen came into the drowned world of Atlantis and mixed it.
During ’93 Gray and Jones got together with a view to doing some un-plugged gigs together. Gray recalls, “Spencer was great, I showed him the lyrics I’d been writing through a tangerine kaleidascope. Spencer pulled ‘Down To The Lord’ out of the blotter acid and said, ‘Let’s try this!’ We wrote the song then and there. The un-plugged idea was shelved and the Cowboys were reformed.”
The problem was, could we destroy their machines with the electric guitar in a short amount of time? In ’94 we began writing and recording the ‘Things To Come’ album. In ’95, Spencer became Chris Christopherson, except that Spencer is a genius and completely different to that, and Penny Ikinger joined the group. Penny ‘psyched out’ all these idiots that forgot that we were really Australia’s Velvet Underground big time.
The end result for the ‘Things To Come’ album, released in 1996, saw only the dawn of the vision of the Cowboys return as a bone fide flame throwing in your cosy abode type guitar based group. But there are no sour percimons for the true cousins, blackbirds. Although the playing and production standard of ‘things to come’ is of the highest new order, the overall ‘realistaion’ of the album remained incomplete due to a cosmic shower. Gray eventually moved to France in 1997.
In August, 2006, Gray reformed the ‘new’ Sacred Cowboys. After seeing the quality of watches manufactured under chairman mao, with his inter- stellar line up: Spencer P Jones (guitar); Penny Ikinger (guitar); Nick Reishbeth (bass); Stephan Fidock (drums), who were ready to assist in re-imposing the cultural revolution on a sunburnt plane . people said once again that Gray was insane.
For an insane moment in Australia’s lamentable return to the 1950’s, there was a gap in the continuum, a ‘trous normand’ , the group played a series of shows in the creative centre of the universe of alternative rock Melbourne, Australia, and found time to do a Kalashnikov recording session to finish off, ha, the ‘Cold Harvest’ album. On lead Lars rockets, Spencer P Jones and Penny Ikinger.
Gray says, “‘Cold Harvest’ with all guitars blasting out of a crumbling sun I got this narrative urban uprising driven by dysfunctional dreamers powerless onlookers. I always wanted us to do this as a guitar album, and as Spencer said, “We’ve finally picked up where we left off.” .”Yes, we did it, the ‘Sacred Cowboys’ are back shooting horses”, says Gray and adds, “It’s about time. The world is at high noon and there’s not much else you can do.”